TURTLE CREEK, Pennsylvania — The battery factory was born in the dark.
When Eos Energy Enterprises moved into a vacant 19th-century factory two years ago, a group of employees searched the vast, darkened building for a light switch by the glow of their phones. Today, the lights are beaming brightly, offering a glimpse of the clean energy revolution that President Joe Biden hopes he has unleashed in America.
More than 300 people are making long-duration batteries for the power grid here. On one floor, workers assemble components against the backdrop of a large American flag. On another, a fleet of yellow robotic arms inject electrolytes and seal lids on the parade of gray, suitcase-sized batteries riding down a conveyor belt.
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“I think we’re going to change the world,” said Dana Radic, a 34-year-old operations manager, as she watched batteries being loaded into containers bound for customers. “I’m working for a company that’s doing something that no one else in the world is doing.”
The question is whether voters will notice.
Western Pennsylvania is ground zero for the climate agenda inherited by Vice President Kamala Harris, who became the Democratic presidential nominee on Monday after Biden’s exit from the race last month. The region is a focal point of America’s natural gas industry and home to a powerful labor movement and an emerging clean energy sector, making it a testing ground for the administration’s plans to phase down fossil fuels while ramping up renewable energy jobs.
This swing region could help tip the scales in a state election forecasters widely believe could decide the presidential contest. In 2016, Donald Trump won the state by less than a percentage point on his path to the White House, only to see Biden reverse those margins four years later. The outcome this year stands to determine whether the climate agenda begun under Biden continues to gather steam with Harris, or if Trump, who has labeled such efforts a “Green New Scam,” will steer it toward a dead end.
National polls show that many voters are unaware of the Inflation Reduction Act, the sweeping climate law that contains $369 billion in clean energy tax breaks for companies like Eos.
“They’re not seeing it as much as they should,” said John Walliser, who oversees policy work at the Pennsylvania Environmental Council. “This is really driving a renaissance in a lot of ways. I don’t think the appreciation is there quite yet, especially when you see the extra amount of investment and the good things that are starting to come out of that.”
From ‘Silence of the Lambs’ to battery breakthrough
Named for the Greek goddess of the dawn, Eos represents an early example of what the administration hopes to achieve.
The company occupies two buildings on a sprawling industrial complex built by the electrical pioneer George Westinghouse in the late 1800s. The hulking factories were once used by Westinghouse Electric Corp. to make components for nuclear power plants before being shut down in the 1980s. One building at the site was later used to film a scene from “The Silence of the Lambs,” the classic 1991 horror film. When Eos moved into Building 700, the site of its battery factory, employees found that the toilets had been removed and sheetrock was cut away to prevent flood damage.
Two years later, batteries are rumbling off an automated manufacturing line, one of two the company hopes to eventually install. It’s already paying off. Eos once needed 18 hours to make 800 batteries. It soon expects to make around 1,500 batteries in as little as four hours.
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The company was conditionally awarded a $398 million loan guarantee from the Department of Energy last year, and it stands to benefit from tax credits under the IRA that support domestic clean energy manufacturing.
“It’s incentivizing us to build manufacturing capacity in the U.S.,” said Eos CEO Joe Mastrangelo.
The batteries made by Eos are different from other energy storage systems being plugged into America’s grid. They are zinc-halide batteries, rather than the lithium-ion batteries that now dominate the utility industry.
Eos’ batteries can provide power for as little as three hours and up to 12 hours, compared with the four hours typically associated with a lithium battery system. They also have lower fire risk. And the majority of the company’s components are made within a four-hour drive of Pittsburgh — a key selling point in a Chinese-dominated industry that’s facing concerns about its consumption of rare minerals.
The company has long been confident of its technology. Its challenge was developing a manufacturing process that could compete in the battery storage market, Eos executives said. It began with a semiautomated production process, which helped it identify bottlenecks and design its first automated production line.
“Hopefully, stuff like this signals the return of American manufacturing as we know it,” said Chris Dellinger, an Eos executive who oversees the company’s manufacturing operations.
Democrats and their allies say the administration’s agenda has led to a wave of new energy investments in the region.
In Leetsdale, a community northwest of Pittsburgh, the solar fabricator Nextracker has partnered with a steel company to make the racks used to mount solar panels. The racks are being made at a former Bethlehem Steel factory that sat idle for years. Form Energy, the Bill Gates-backed battery startup, set up shop just over the state line in West Virginia. And the area is home to several clean energy startups that have sprung out of Carnegie Mellon University, the powerhouse research institution in Pittsburgh.
But many concede that voters have yet to see the benefits of the president’s agenda.
Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro was a finalist to be Harris’ running mate, in part because of his ability to work with the state’s natural gas industry and his use of federal climate dollars to support clean energy efforts ranging from industrial decarbonization to plugging abandoned oil and gas wells. Harris ultimately chose Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her vice presidential pick on Tuesday.
Climate controversy
Local unions have pinned their hopes on a more controversial element of the climate agenda, one that could fracture the Democrats’ political coalition in Pennsylvania.
A group of companies led by CNX Resources has proposed capturing the methane that’s leaking from coal mines and shipping it to the Pittsburgh airport, where it would be used to make hydrogen for sustainable aviation fuel. The natural gas driller hopes to benefit from the IRA’s generous hydrogen subsidies for what it estimates will be a $1.5 billion project.
CNX says the project would create an economic incentive for capturing a powerful greenhouse gas. Union leaders are drawn to the project’s promise of creating 3,000 construction jobs.
In a region where organized labor has forged a close relationship with the natural gas industry, union leaders say the airport project represents one of the best opportunities to sell rank and file members on a climate plan that could be turned into votes for Harris this fall.
“Our members think black and white, like, why am I working here?,” said Kenneth Broadbent, business manager at Steamfitters Local 449. “They do understand when money was channeled from infrastructure, and they’re on a job site making a middle class way of life, so that needs to be communicated more.”
The idea has won the backing of top Pennsylvania Democrats, including Shapiro and Sens. John Fetterman and Bob Casey.
But environmentalists are skeptical.
“You are trading a short-lived pollutant for a permanent pollutant, which is a very bad deal for the climate,” said Danny Cullenward, a senior fellow at the Kleinman Center for Energy Policy at the University of Pennsylvania.
Methane, which leaks from coal mines, is a powerful greenhouse gas but short-lived in the atmosphere. Carbon dioxide, which is emitted in the process of making hydrogen from methane, the primary component of natural gas, lasts in the atmosphere for centuries.
Sean O’Leary, a researcher at the Ohio River Valley Institute, pointed to the recent natural gas boom as a sign that jobs are fleeting with such projects. They create a wave of construction jobs, but few permanent positions. Employment in the counties that account for the vast majority of Pennsylvania’s natural gas production is down 8.1 percent since 2001, even as the state’s overall workforce grew by more than 5 percent over that time.
“These are very capital intensive and not labor intensive industries that we’re talking about,” O’Leary said.
The Biden administration has yet to finalize rules for how the hydrogen tax credits will be administered.
The brewing fight over the airport is playing out amid questions about Harris’ approach to the natural gas industry. Trump has been quick to remind voters that Harris supported a fracking ban when she ran for president in 2020, a potential liability in the country’s second largest gas producing state. Harris recently disavowed a fracking ban.
But the gas industry remains wary. Industry officials pointed to the Biden administration's pause on new liquefied natural gas export terminals, continued permitting fights over proposed pipelines and new pollution regulations on gas-fired power plants — even as demand for natural gas continues to rise.
“It's hard to feel supported when pipelines aren't being built in infrastructure, when you look at where drilling is being allowed to happen and those areas are being limited,” said George Stark, director of external relations at Coterra Energy, a gas driller with a large presence in Pennsylvania. “It gives you a lot of pause, but at the same time you also know that the market's not going anywhere.”
Trump, by contrast, is widely viewed in the industry as “someone who's more sympathetic to getting infrastructure built,” Stark said.
David Callahan, president of the Marcellus Shale Coalition, a trade group for the gas industry, echoed those concerns by saying the White House had posed “considerable challenges” for the industry. Harris' past support for a fracking ban would create "a dire situation for our energy security, for consumer savings, jobs," he said.
Some local officials said they are hopeful for a strategy that promotes the gas industry, even as it attracts new types of clean energy manufacturing. In Turtle Creek, where Eos has set up shop, the scars of Westinghouse’s departure still linger after 40 years. The borough of 5,000 people some 12 miles southeast of Pittsburgh has amedian household incomeof around $42,000, less than the statewide average of almost $72,000. More than a quarter of the population lives below the poverty line, or more than twice the state average.
Many homes are still boarded up and Eos is working on improving public transportation for its workers.
“It’s a powerful symbol and it’s a powerful reality,” said Matt Smith, a former Democratic state senator who now serves as the chief growth officer at the Allegheny Conference on Community Development, a local group focused on expanding the economy. “They're literally inventing new forms of long duration storage right in the cradle of manufacturing, not just for the region, but for the country.”
Warren Cook is one person who found a job at Eos. Cook, 34, worked in the kitchen of a local pizza chain in a nearby town. He started as a filler at Eos, injecting batteries with a salt brine solution that acts as its electrolyzer. He did a stint as a welder and now works as a loader, placing batteries in the containers that are shipped off to customers. Each container holds 672 batteries.
Increasingly, Cook sees childhood friends working in the factory.
“I come out the break room and it’s like, oh, whatever, whatchya doing here,” he said. “It’s good man, it’s a good place.”
But he declined to say how the election could affect his job. “I focus on my own life,” he said.
In its most recent financial report to investors, Eos lost $98 million in the first six months of the year, compared with a loss of $203 million over the same period last year. But the company sees a path to profitability with an order backlog totaling $586 million. Eos said its batteries had discharged 3.6 gigawatt hours of electricity in the field at the end of June.
Mastrangelo, the CEO, said the company will grow regardless of who wins the presidential election, in part because Eos’ business plan is not predicated on receiving federal tax credits.
In June, the company announced it had received a private investment of up to $315.5 million from Cerberus Capital Management LP. And as a manufacturing company in the industrial heartland, it should appeal to Trump as much as it does to Harris, he said.
Still, federal subsidies gave Eos “breathing room to scale” and that’s a key to warding off competition from China, Mastrangelo said. He pointed to the solar industry as an example in which Chinese manufacturers have been able to flood the global market with panels thanks to subsidies from Beijing.
“How do you compete against an economic policy of a country that says we're going to scale, we're going to incur losses, but we're going to get to the future of where the industry is,” Mastrangelo said. The IRA is “a strategic supply chain operations fund that is focused on manufacturing supply chain capability in the United States and with its allies.”
A few weeks earlier, Mastrangelo was asked at a conference in Pittsburgh how the climate law could be implemented better. He responded by saying the U.S. should stop using two phrases when talking about energy: “We’ve always done it this way” and “we’ve never done it this way.”
“If we stop using those two sentences, we'll accelerate this,” Mastrangelo said. “We got to do things differently.”
